My latest in PJ Media:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday announced that Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, which was renamed “the West Bank” by Jordan in 1948, were not “inconsistent with international law.” CNN noted indignantly that this “breaks with international law and consensus,” but in reality, no state and no entity, including the Palestinian Authority, has any valid legal claim to that territory other than Israel itself.
“After carefully studying all sides of the legal debate,” Pompeo said, “this administration agrees with President Reagan: the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not, per se, inconsistent with international law,” although he added that the U.S. government was “expressing no view on the legal status of any individual settlement” or “addressing or prejudging the ultimate status of the West Bank.” This decision, Pompeo added, was “based on the unique facts, history and circumstances presented by the establishment of civilian settlements in the West Bank.”
The announcement represented a break with the stance of the Obama administrations and previous administrations that had regarded the Israeli settlements as a sticking point in the vaunted “peace process,” and repeatedly called upon the Israelis to suspend them. But Pompeo was right. The “unique facts, history and circumstances” of Judea and Samaria include the fact, however uncomfortable it may be to the political and media elites, that the West Bank is not “occupied Palestinian land.” There is actually no Palestinian land to occupy. There never has been a Palestinian state in history, and the Palestinian nationality itself wasn’t invented until the 1960s, as a propaganda point that could be used to attack Israel. The Palestinian Arabs are no different culturally, linguistically, or religiously from the neighboring Arabs of Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
The reality, as the new book The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process shows, is that this land was part of the Ottoman Empire. When that empire was crumbling at the end of World War I, it ceded the territory to the League of Nations, which awarded it to Britain for the express purpose of establishing a national home for Jews.
There is much more. Read the rest here.